Category: Update

By John King : sfchronicle – excerpt

The need to build new housing in cities tends to be discussed in simplistic terms — for or against, tall or short, market rate or affordable.

Three recently completed complexes in San Francisco illuminate the core issue that too often gets lost: Such housing should be measured by its capacity to improve people’s lives.

The three buildings do this despite very different settings: Treasure Island, Mission Bay and near ever-troubled Sixth Street. They succeed by providing shelter and services for people who were living on city streets and by enhancing their neighborhoods.

They nurture community, inside and out.

“The idea is not just to house people, but for people to thrive,” said Vanna Whitney of Leddy Maytum Stacy, the architect for the four-story, 140-unit HomeRise at Mission Bay. “We want something that feels like a home and not an institution.”…

The same goal anchors Maceo May Apartments, 104 units of supportive housing on Treasure Island that opened officially in May. Architectural firm Mithun designed it for Swords to Plowshares, and all residents are military veterans who were living on the streets…

The largest and most ambitious of the three newcomers is at 1064 Mission St. between Sixth and Seventh streets, one of the most troubled stretches of San Francisco’s downtown area…

They’re islands of stability and economic diversity in a city where neither is abundant. They’re also models of thoughtful design at both the human and urban scale — a trait that should be encouraged, whoever the residents might be…(more)

By J.K. Dineen : sfchronicle – excerpt

The developer of a $1.2 billion mixed-use project at the corner of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue has suspended construction, the latest blow in a cascade of bad news that has hit the greater Civic Center and Mid-Market neighborhoods in recent years.

Branded as Hayes Point, the 540-foot tower at 30 Van Ness Ave. had been a rare bright spot in a district that has lost high-profile office tenants like Uber, Reddit and Block, as well as the city’s largest Whole Foods, which shut down a year after opening.

Hayes Point was one of the few major construction projects underway in San Francisco at the moment.

City officials have been pushing legislation to revive downtown and Civic Center. Recent moves include cutting some fees and the amount of inclusionary housing in some market-rate projects with the hope of jump-starting construction. Legislation to smooth office-to-residential conversions is also moving ahead…

Hayes Point is a rarity in San Francisco because it is a true mixed-use project, with 333 for-sale condos on top of 290,000 square feet of office space, with arts space and retail on the ground floor.

In a statement, Lendlease Executive General Manager Arden Hearing said his group would be “pausing construction on Hayes Point until markets normalize and we’re able to bring in early tenancy commitments, or a capital partner, or both.”…(more)

RELATED:

S.F. must create 82,000 new homes in 8 years. The city is already behind

By Joe DiMento : sfchronicle – excerpt

Much ink has been spilled in San Francisco about a proposed development at 2700 Sloat Blvd. that would create a 50-story condo in the Outer Sunset, a neighborhood with no buildings over six stories tall. The development likely received its death blow when the Board of Appeals voted down the appeal of the Planning Commission’s rejection of the project.

But even if the Sunset tower never becomes more than an artist’s rendering that proliferated across media outlets, it has already achieved something important — moved our “Housing Overton Window” closer to where it needs to be to alleviate our housing crisis.

In political science, the “Overton window” is the term for the spectrum of acceptable political beliefs in a given system. For decades, it has been perfectly acceptable for neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset to oppose nearly all new multiunit developments. This has created a catastrophic housing shortage to the tune of 3.5 million units statewide — manifesting in astronomical rents and home prices in California and fully one-half of the entire country’s unsheltered homeless population…(more)

by Annie Gaus : sfstandard – excerpt

Attorneys for the Coalition on Homelessness, which accused San Francisco officials of conducting illegal sweeps of homeless encampments, are seeking a settlement that includes filling vacant housing units and eliminating police from the enforcement of laws barring lodging in public.

“We all have a realistic sense of the potential risks and rewards of continued litigation,” wrote attorneys for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

In a letter to City Attorney David Chiu, the attorneys laid out a proposed settlement framework with several provisions, including a requirement that the city fill an estimated 1,000 vacant supportive housing units and require that empty units be filled within 30 days

The proposed settlement also includes a provision that the city spend unused funds from Proposition C and Proposition I, two ballot measures intended to boost funding for homelessness services and supportive housing, and funding for affordable housing, respectively…(more)

I would add a demand that the city open more public restrooms to allow the public, including the homeless and demand a more reliable system for picking up trash on the public streets and sidewalks. They could re-purpose the funds that were going to buy expensive new trash cans for some of these purposes.

By Diana Lambert : edsource – excerpt

School districts across the country are increasingly turning to four-day school weeks to save money, increase student attendance and recruit new teachers. But the trend isn’t taking hold in California. Only two tiny, remote California school districts, Leggett Valley Unified in Mendocino County and Big Sur Unified in Monterey County, have shortened the week for students.

The four-day week isn’t feasible for most schools in the state. California’s Education Code requires schools to hold classes five days a week or have their funding reduced. Over the years state legislators have given exemptions to a handful of school districts in remote areas of California, although they must still meet the requirement for annual instructional minutes. Some of the districts that gained approval for a four-day week have reverted to a five-day schedule and others never instituted the truncated week…(more)

By Joe Eskenazi : missionlocal – excerpt

Cruise stoped in the middle of the intersection, photo sent from reader

State likely to approve unfettered autonomous vehicle use this week, Cruise is scaling up its fleet — and cops and firefighters grumble..

Until recently, the driverless cars whirring about San Francisco were a novelty. Then they, too, grew ubiquitous. And, soon, they will be beyond ubiquitous. The California Public Utilities Commission is on Thursday scheduled to vote on allowing autonomous vehicle companies to run driverless taxis 24/7/365. That comes on the heels of a meeting today with disgruntled public safety officials.

But cops and firefighters are also disgruntled because, knowing a little something about politics, they foresee the state’s Public Utilities Commission all but certainly voting to give driverless vehicles full and unfettered access to the city — no matter what cops and firefighters say and no matter what they’ve meticulously documented.

That’s where the smart money is. Or at least lots of money — tremendous amounts of money and power are in play. Which would go a long way toward explaining this pending vote…

“How many autonomous vehicles would it take to blanket a city like San Francisco to have a disruptive service similar to Uber?” asked a participant in a July 25 earnings call for General Motors, the parent company of autonomous vehicle outfit Cruise. “Can you do it with under 1,000 to 2,000 Origins?”

“Origins” are Cruise’s large, autonomous, six-passenger vehicles that don’t come equipped with steering wheels or any trappings of human control. They look a bit like rolling shoe boxes — and they’re already here in San Francisco…(more)

REALTED:
Driverless car freezes, forcing drivers into Valencia Street center bike lane

There is a simple solution to the Robotaxi problem and people may already be gearing up to do it. Lots of workers are striking now. Just refuse to use them. The rental bikes and scooters and cars are all on life support now. There is not much room for profit, especially if they swarm the city with large numbers. Who is going to come to their aide when they are hated and despised by emergency responders? My favorite letter against them so far points out the rather obvious problem with a non-human. Humans can communicate with each other. We cannot communicate with a remote human handler. And the remote human handler is not going to be able to handle a lot of problems at one time. Why not just put the human handlers in the vehicle? They can help with luggage and groceries the way a normal taxi would. Details on the hearing here: https://metermadness.wordpress.com/robotaxis/

 

By Laya Neelakanada : sfchronicle – excerpt

Supervisor Matt Dorsey is urging San Francisco Mayor London Breed to reallocate 100% of the $18.9 million in funds budgeted for “wellness hubs” into services for people jailed on drug charges.

In a letter addressed to the mayor, Dorsey said he withdrew his support for a wellness hub in his district after it dropped supervised consumption services from its core mission.

The wellness hubs, intended to build upon the now-shuttered Tenderloin Center, were part of a strategy by the Department of Public Health to offer overdose prevention services. Instead, Dorsey advocated for moving the funds to custodial care. The proposed $18.9 million would be split across two fiscal years, with $11 million and $7.9 million, respectively.

Dorsey cited legal obstacles and the urgency of addressing substance abuse issues as reasons for reallocating funding to address “increasingly chaotic open-air drug scenes.”

“While I remain a staunch supporter of supervised consumption sites as an appropriate and necessary response to our record-shattering fatal drug overdose crisis, the inability of our city and its nonprofit partners to assume the requisite legal risks at this time to offer supervised consumption services diminishes the value of moving forward with the ‘half-loaf’ approach now contemplated by DHP for Wellness Hubs,” Dorsey wrote in his five-page letter…(more)

At least he isn’t afraid to change his mind when he loses faith in a program instead of doubling down on it. That is rare these days.

By Aldo Toledo : sfchronicle – excerpt

Families living in RVs parked near Lake Merced could soon be forced to move to other neighborhood streets so the city can break ground on critical pedestrian safety work this fall. The potential moves come as officials continue to struggle to help those living in vehicles that began to flood the neighborhood in recent years.

Four-hour weekday parking restrictions could return to Winston Drive, Lake Merced Boulevard and Buckingham Way near the San Francisco State University campus if the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency approves a request for enforcement from Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who represents the area. The area is home to dozens of largely Latino families living in RVs and other vehicles, many of whom work in the city but lost their housing during the pandemic.

Melgar wants those unhoused families to move their vehicles to a nearby street — though she didn’t identify where — while city workers finish a planned quick-build pedestrian and bike safety project along Lake Merced Boulevard, a busy street where two pedestrians have been killed since 2021. The project is set to begin in September and will eliminate about 101 parking spaces on the east side of Lake Merced Boulevard to give way for a new protected bike lane, the SFMTA said, adding that the agency will distribute flyers about the parking removal at least two weeks before work begins…(more)

By Tim Redmond :48hills – excerpt

It took a year-long Chronicle investigation, a hearing called by Sup. Dean Preston, and repeated efforts by tenants in the city’s supportive housing program to convince the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to provide a policy on how and why low-income tenants can be evicted.

Most of the evictions, which are rampant, come for non-payment of rent; Preston argued in March that nobody in San Francisco today should be evicted from a city-funded SRO hotel room because they don’t have the money for rent…

On Thursday/3, the Homlessness Oversight Commission will hold a hearing on the policy, including a presentation from the tenant organizers. They want a policy that says “must,” not “should,” and that includes mandatory arbitration:…

They also want to see limits on “nuisance” evictions to actual nuisances that impact other residents (not, for example, a tenant with a messy room).

That meeting starts at 9am in City Hall Room 416..… (more)

This is a question some of us have had questions about this for a long time. Why are supportive housing and low income housing managers moving people in and out of housing? Is there a program that encourages them to move people? We are also wondering why it is so difficult to address actual problems stemming from abusive and anti-social behavior conducted against landlords, tenants and neighbors?

Many cases of this are well-documented and have been covered by the local media. We appear to have serial abusers who somehow get themselves into place. Pay the rent for a while and then quit. Some even move out of their place but leave their stuff and refuse to vacate the place after they leave, exposing the landlord and or roommates and neighbors to expensive tactics to take back their peaceful use of their homes and or property for months while they drag out the evictions process for months in hopes of being paid to leave. When and if the perpetrators ever leave the landlords will never rent again out of fear that they might get another roommate or tenant from hell.